Without automation, scheduling of reciprocal events can be a difficult and time consuming endeavor. For example, in the case of youth hockey, because of the expense associated with ice time and officials, when a game is scheduled at one team's home location, it is often desirable to simultaneously schedule “reciprocal dates” or “reciprocal games” where the team which hosted the first game can be hosted in a second. Currently, the standard approach in youth hockey is to create schedules manually, with a master scheduler spending days and in many cases weeks trying to match the teams in the league with one another while balancing home and away games. There are many problems with this approach, especially as applied in leagues with multiple people responsible for scheduling (e.g., one master scheduler for each organization). First, because master schedulers are generally not professional hockey schedulers, it can be difficult for individuals to coordinate with one another, and to find time to devote to scheduling. Second, in cases where there are multiple master schedulers who meet to create a schedule, there are costs associated with simply setting up a meeting (e.g., money required to rent space, time required for schedulers to travel to the meeting, food and electricity costs associated with running the meeting, etc). Third, actually creating the schedule can be difficult because successful rinks have limited flexibility as downtime is minimize and many leagues are limited to playing games only on specific days (e.g., weekends).
Despite these well known and longstanding difficulties with manual scheduling, attempts at automated scheduling tools, such as LeagueUSA, have not met these needs, largely because they lack the flexibility to allow individual schedulers to perform the (often qualitative) balancing between factors such as team rivalries, distances between teams, and coaches and player preferences which would enhance the scheduling process. Furthermore, they do not allow for identifying reciprocal slots. Additionally, attempts to make scheduling easier by purchasing excess slots have resulted in significantly increasing the costs associated with creating a schedule for a league. As a result, there is a long-felt but unmet need in the field of youth hockey scheduling for an approach which can replace current manual scheduling techniques while still allowing flexibility to consider factors which might be important in a particular instance. Further, other fields which currently use similar methods to those employed in youth hockey scheduling and where a suitable automated technology is not available would also substantially benefit from a flexible automated or semi-automated scheduling technology that allows for identifying reciprocal ice and allows for one or multiple schedulers to schedule with their own preferences.